This is an IHeart podcast.

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Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A Production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

The year was 1865, the place, an estate just east of Nashville.

A man named Colonel Patrick Henry Anderson was struggling under debts and his land was on the verge of collapse.

His financial ruin seemed inevitable.

Now, before you extend too much sympathy toward the colonel,

it's worth knowing that he was the manager of a plantation in Civil War-era Tennessee.

His financial woes were entirely tied to the resolution of the Civil War.

The Confederacy had lost, and human trafficking,

the enterprise that supported the entire southern economy, was no more. Colonel Anderson was so desperate for anyone to salvage his fortunes that he wrote a letter to a man named Jordan,

entreating him to come back and work for him. Jordan, you see, was a former enslaved man of

the colonels. Jordan had also taken the last name Anderson and had been freed by the Union

Army in 1864. The request to come back and work for his former enslaver was so absurd that Jordan,

who was by this point living in Dayton, Ohio, had to respond.

Now, the man could not read or write, but what he could do was dictate to a neighbor who

sent the response on his behalf. The document was entitled, Letter from a freedman to his

old master. In this letter, Jordan Anderson described his pleasant life in Ohio to the man who had once held him captive for decades.

Jordan insisted that he and his wife, Millie, were in a good situation and didn't wish to go back south,

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